Mr. Faust

By Arthur Davison Ficke

Arthur DavisonFicke was an American poet, playwright, and expert of Japanese art. Ficke hada national reputation as "a poet's poet," and "one ofAmerica's most expert sonneteers." Under the alias Anne Knish, Fickeco-authored Spectra.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Krill Press
• Release date: May 14, 2016
• ISBN: 9781531275228

Book preview

MR. FAUST

..................

Arthur Davison Ficke

YURITA PRESS

Thank you for reading. If you enjoy this book, please leave a review or connect with the author.

All rights reserved. Aside from brief quotations for media coverage and reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the author’s permission. Thank you for supporting authors and a diverse, creative culture by purchasing this book and complying with copyright laws.

Copyright © 2016 by Arthur Davison Ficke

Interior design by Pronoun

Distribution by Pronoun

TABLE OF CONTENTS

THE MODERN DRAMA SERIES EDITED BY EDWIN BJÖRKMAN

INTRODUCTION

INSCRIPTION

THE FIRST ACT

THE SECOND ACT

THE THIRD ACT

THE FOURTH ACT

THE FIFTH ACT

Mr. Faust

By

Arthur Davison Ficke

Mr. Faust

Published by Yurita Press

New York City, NY

First published circa 1945

Copyright © Yurita Press, 2015

All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

About YURITA Press

Yurita Press is a boutique publishing company run by people who are passionate about history’s greatest works. We strive to republish the best books ever written across every conceivable genre and making them easily and cheaply available to readers across the world.

THE MODERN DRAMA SERIES EDITED BY EDWIN BJÖRKMAN

..................

BY

ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE

NEW YORK

MITCHELL KENNERLEY

MCMXIII

COPYRIGHT 1913 BY

MITCHELL KENNERLEY

THE·PLIMPTON·PRESS

NORWOOD·MASS·U·S·A

The author gratefully acknowledges his debt for permission to reprint one of the lyrics herein, which appeared originally in Poetry.

INTRODUCTION

..................

THROUGH ALL THE WORK OF Arthur Davison Ficke runs a note of bigness that compels attention even when one feels that he is still groping both for form and thought. In Mr. Faust this note has assumed commanding proportions, while at the same time the uncertainty manifest in some of the earlier work has almost wholly disappeared. Intellectually as well as artistically, this play shows a surprising maturity. It impresses me, for one, as the expression of a well-rounded and very profound philosophy of life—and this philosophy stands in logical and sympathetic relationship to what the western world to-day regards as its most advanced thought. The evolutionary conception of life is the foundation of that philosophy, which, however, has little or nothing in common with the materialistic and dogmatic evolutionism of the last century. The work sprung from that philosophy is full of the new sense of mystery, which makes the men of to-day realize that the one attitude leading nowhere is that of denial. Faith and doubt walk hand in hand, each one being to the other check and goad alike. And with this new freedom to believe as well as to question, man becomes once more the centre of his known universe. But there he stands, humbly proud, not as the arrogant master of a dead world, but merely as the foremost servant of a life-principle which asserts itself in the grain of sand as in the brain of man.

Yet Mr. Faust is by no means a philosophical or moral tract. It is, first of all and throughout, a living, breathing work of art, instinct with beauty and faithful in its every line to the principle laid down by its author in the preface to one of his earlier volumes: Poetical imagination must fail altogether if it descends from its natural sphere and assumes work which is properly that of economic or political experience. Nor can it usefully urge its own peculiar intuitions as things of practical validity.

Mr. Ficke was born in 1883 at Davenport, Iowa, and there he is still living, although I understand that he has since then been wandering in so many other regions, physical and spiritual, that he can hardly call it his home. He graduated from Harvard in 1904 and spent the next travelling in all sorts of strange and poetic places—Japan, India, the Greek mountains, the Aegean Islands. Returning to the United States, he studied law and was admitted to the Bar in 1908. While studying, he taught English for a year at the University of Iowa, lecturing on the history of the Arthurian Legends.

He was a mere boy when he began to write, turning from the first to the metrical form of expression and remaining faithful to it in most of his subsequent efforts. His poems and essays have been printed in almost all the leading magazines. So far he has published five volumes of verse: From the Isles, a series of lyrics of the Aegean Sea; The Happy Princess, a romantic narrative poem; The Earth Passion, a series of poems which may be characterized as the effort of a star-gazer to find satisfaction in the things of the earth; The Breaking of Bonds, a Shelleyan drama of social unrest, where he has tried to formulate a hope for our final emergence from the maelstrom of class-conflict; and Twelve Japanese Painters, a group of poems expressive of the peculiar and alluring charm of the great Japanese painters and their world of remote beauty.

Edwin Björkman.

* The Breaking of Bonds, 1910

* Mr. Faust, 1913

INSCRIPTION

..................

Pale Goethe, Marlowe, Lessing—calm your fears! None plots to steal your laurel wreaths away. Approach; take tickets: you shall witness here The unromantic Faustus of to-day—

A Faustus whom no mystic choirs sustain, No wizard fiends blind with prodigious spell. The mortal earth shall serve him as domain Whether he mount to Heaven or sink to Hell.

Yet, mount or sink, your lights around him shine. And there shall flow, bubbling with woe or mirth, From these new bottles your familiar wine, As ancient as man’s rule upon the earth.

THE FIRST ACT

..................

THE SCENE IS THE LIBRARY of John Faust, a large handsome room panelled in dark oak and lined with rows of books in open book-shelves. On the right is a carved white stone fireplace, with deep chairs before it. In the far left corner of the room, on a pedestal, stands a stiff bust of George Washington. Near it hangs a wonderful Titian portrait, a thing of another world. The furniture